The action isn't between political parties, it's the factions within the party. It's structured differently than the US so it looks strange that it's one party in power all the time, but there is plenty of push/pull for satisfying public opinion going on within the LDP. They have to _really_ screw up or ignore public opinion for a long time for the public to choose a different party.
Edit: come to think of it... can you imagine the leader of a political party choosing to step down due to popularity issues, allow a subordinate take the party in a new direction, and suddenly people are much happier with that party? seems oddly familiar. Imagine if the gov was structured in such a way that this is considered normal and then you basically understand why one party is always in power.
Usually Japanese leaders still get voted in before they get "revoted" by their congress as leader, PM. Your example of recent Kamala isnt that apt as she didnt get voted in as Democrat leadership, but selected by inner Dems cicle very much akin to that X-Files cancer man commitees majestic 12. Your example would be more correct if after this Nov, she won the election assuming no more luggage votes, machine recounts frauds happened again like 2020 (I doubt so, which means if she won, then your example still not correctly apply in this Japanese case). Anyway westerners are not that highly educated in politics other than American. So whatever explaination, I doubt he or she the audience can understand pretty much like describing blue to someone born blind.
My sister just came to visit me in Tokyo and asked what to bring as a gift... I said, "If you can, please bring my Calvin and Hobbes collection for my kids to read." My 10 and 6 year olds have been devouring them ever since.
There is something electric and timeless about these strips. I am certain they don't understand all of the vocabulary but still they read it. It is a format that lures kids in and then uses that attention it has earned to stretch minds. Re-reading it as an adult also rings true in a totally different way. Calvin's parents become sympathetic compatriots.
It's smarter than most adults but captivates kids. It is a decade of work that deserves all the awards that could possibly be given.
I have a nephew turning six this year and have been considering getting him some of the collections as well, wondering if it would have the same formative impact on him as on me. I remember reading the strip in the paper as a six-year-old blonde kid and coming away with the impression that there was nothing weird about daydreaming all the time, or being articulate, or having an aversion to team sports, etc. all of which traits I carry with me to this day, 30-ish years later. Of course, now I find myself identifying more with Calvin's dad - that's life, I guess!
My 6 year old loves the colorful Sunday ones... but he has me read them to him and I don't think for many of them he doesn't 'get it' yet. My guess is that the truly ideal age is around 9 or 10. That being said, I think there's no wrong time to introduce them.
I think it just keeps growing on you. Some themes in C&H are appreciated when you are older. Love and death. Friendship. Being kind to environment. Fakery in news...
There are a lot of doubters in the threads here and I think a lot of it has to do with the generative art that accompanies the article. They haven't picked a technology and it may actually end up being driverless cars on dedicated lanes, or automated rail technology. The point is non-stop driverless tech. The country is very well aware of the coming labor shortage and is going to rely heavily on automation in the future.
Anyone who has ever stepped on a Shinkansen can understand that Japan has a way of getting shit done. It may start a bit later than other countries, but when they finally decide to execute (and this is still in planning stages so it might not), it happens surprisingly quickly.
I've watched them totally revamp Shibuya station over the past 10 years in ways that make it utterly unrecognisable to someone who hasn't been here since then, all while never taking down-time. There is another article on the HN front page titled "Why it takes NYC nearly 10 years to install 500 feet of pipes" right now... that's perhaps coloring people's expectations of the possible.
> They haven't picked a technology and it may actually end up being driverless cars on dedicated lanes, or automated rail technology.
Which completely undermines the title, hence the doubt.
If they haven’t picked a technology, they haven’t really done much more than express interest in having an option to do something. The talk about extremely long (and expensive) tunnels or conveyor belts feels silly when the obviously more economical solutions like autonomous trucks or traditional train rails are vastly cheaper.
The conveyor belt thing is just a PR stunt. Nobody could possibly think it’s a viable option compared to traditional alternatives.
The conveyor belt thing has a lot of momentum behind it. There's a push to created automated logistical grid that replaces TEUs with a smaller more manageable and routable standard. Self driving and traditional rail just have extraneous overhead that a basic conveyor with switching simplifies.
Well belt conveyor definitely isn't the right approach - it's about 1.5-2x more expensive than other types of pallet conveyor (e.g. chain) and is difficult to maintain (snapped belts etc). Line shaft is another option, but has similar drawbacks to chain at this scale.
Also bear in mind that pallet conveyor is slow - in most factories or warehouses where you are covering large distances the standard approach would actually be to put a rail guided vehicle in (often called a pallet monorail).
Plus conveyors would then need to be enclosed (they have lots of moving parts - it's not like train rails where you can just put them outside and let it get wet. The pallets also can't get wet, but it would take less infrastructure to cover the pallets than cover the full 310 mile route.).
A material ropeway would be another option - not commonly deployed but probably a much better fit for moving pallets across these sort of distances and much faster than conveyor (although still probably only 15-20 miles per hour!).
I think the skepticism comes from other companies and countries taking about using autonomous battery-powered sleds when the power of trains comes from the reduction to one or more traction units, which is far less complex.
If they have dedicated conveyor tracks* above grade the system makes sense, but this is expensive due to the costs of grade separation.
It's possible but probably the most expensive route.
* The tracks should probably be catenary or third rail, not battery.
> with the generative art that accompanies the article.
About that, I also noticed.-
Has anybody looked into how the lowering of the "illustration threshold" for visualizing ideas might influence how many, or which, or how hard it might be to bring them to reality? Or securing investment?
There’s a long history of users and consumers having unrealistic ideas of technology true capabilities. How many times have we encountered users who think poor quality images can be computer “enhanced” to show detail that’s not really there, because countless murder mystery movies and tv shows do exactly that?
The blurred line between fantasy/hallucinations and reality will only become worse, I fear.
I agree with you and I'm a bit surprised that more people don't see the difference between what Manning and Snowden did and what Assange was up to (including apparently Snowden himself).
At the time, I was initially a person who thought that what Wikileaks was doing was a net good for the rule of law, but changed my mind when I learned about the selective nature of what they publish. The fact that they were playing politics, pushing conspiracy theories, and actively coordinating with the Trump campaign completely discredits any moral high-ground they had. You can say that what happened to him is unfair and that may even be true but Assange is no hero.
If we consider other forms of journalism, it seems quite normal that a newspaper or TV station offers a specific political perspective, the news it publishes being selectively curated by its editor. Perhaps the issue is not that Assange had an editorial slant, but that his publication stood alone; we had no whistleblower's equivalent of CNN or the New York Times to consult for contrast as Wikileaks began playing the part of Fox News.
Yeah all the famous, immortalized people we look back on in history have had a bias. The dude has a bone to pick with the Democratic party. So what. He exposed corruption deep in government regardless. Saying "yeah he exposed crimes, but he mostly only did it to spite the liberals, so does was it really a good thing?" is bizarre.
This is great advice and I've actually built ponds on this principle in the past. It works well. There are tons of Youtube videos on this subject as well. The channel ozponds is pretty good for this.
What I am now interested in is the construction of spring boxes and finding and digging a natural spring from a wooded area. I used to do this when I was younger, but I've found that while the internet generally has all kinds of new techniques that I wasn't aware of, unfortunately, I haven't found a great source of info for this topic yet.
Is there a name for the practice of embedding a completely unrelated video into the middle of an article? I find this practice to be so mystifying. Does that work on readers?
> How would we get there from here? I’m not smart enough to figure out what the regulatory regime is that would ban most of what private-equity does and tilt the playing field in favor of resilient lifestyle businesses.
One good way is to pay attention to the details, learn how things are made (YouTube helps with this!) and not be impressed by shitty work, in general. I buy plenty of MDF-built products but I also know the difference. There are just so many people who have no idea.
That is a good point. I would also think that buyers must vote with their money. Stop buying cheaply made products as much as possible, when an alternative slightly-expensive yet well made things exist. Of course, easier said than done, especially when money is a constraint.
> The yen is at a 34-year low against the U.S. dollar
I live in Japan and this has happened so quickly it's been stunning. While not much has changed domestically so far, I am hearing and starting to see foreign people question whether they could work and live here long term if it stays like this. It's fine if you are earning USD and visiting Japan (wow there are so many tourists this year) but if your salary is priced in JPY and you plan to retire in the US, it's basically impossible right now.
My understanding is that most of the pain in JPY is being caused by carry trades by the financial sector. Because they are very common currencies and most traders right now believe that both the US and JP are stuck with a wide spread in interest rates... you can borrow JPY and invest in USD and make 4-5% on it.
As an aside, I also wish we didn't use the terms strong/weak for currencies because it carries a good/bad connotation. It's just high/low and there are pros/cons to each.
The other side to this is that after decades of zero to negative inflation (deflation), prices in Japan are finally starting to go up. My personal economic barometer, the Yoshinoya nami gyuudon beef bowl that was 280 yen from the 1990s straight through to the mid-2010s, is up to 448 yen at last check. Not by coincidence, their primary ingredient is imported beef.
Japanese salaries, however, are by and large not going up (certainly not at the same rate), which is obviously causing even more pain and further dividing the haves from the have-nots.
I have a similar concern as an American living in Europe for the last ten years. It was OK-ish when I could work remote and price myself in USD but given the softness in the software job market and the very weak Euro (combined with very low pay in Europe in general) it does make it harder to consider ever being able to move back.
> is being caused by carry trades by the financial sector.
This is a solid short-term explanation, but there's always an investment sector focused on the long term, and those guys are looking at the demographic disaster Japan will inevitably experience.
Carry trades and yield arbitrage explain a lot, but the Hikikomori are wrecking the Yen over the long term.
So quickly so, that I was considering buying a new PC costing about 450,000yen, now it's over 500,000 and I'm putting it off. (For comparison I could get this for approx 3k USD).
A spread on interest rates means you can e.g. borrow some JPY at 2% interest, spend it to purchase USD, then loan the USD to someone else at 6% interest.
After you pay back the 2% interest to the original lender, you're left with 4% as profit.
This usually happens when one government pushes banks for lower interest rates (to stimulate the domestic economy).
It creates a large volume of trades buying USD with JPY, and by doing so causes the JPY currency to become less valuable relative to USD.
This is exactly right, and also demonstrates why the Japan is in a bind.
They don't mind the currency going low as it helps exports but going too low, too fast is a problem. Increasing interest rates to narrow the spread will affect the economy. So they are walking a very tight line here between JPY/USD spreads and domestic economy/interest rates. All global economies are to some extent but since JPY is trusted and has had low interest rates for decades, it's popular within the finance industry for this kind of trade.
It’s not a risk-free trade. Borrowing yen and buying dollars is effectively shorting the yen (relative to the US dollar). The investors who did this before made money because the yen dropped, but maybe they will want to take profits, which would tend to strengthen the yen.
Borrowing yen now to buy dollars is sort of like shorting a stock when the price already dropped. The interest rate difference makes it a cheaper bet, but it’s still a bet and could go bad if the yen strengthens.
In the early 1980s, a couple of Australian banks took advantage of very low Swiss interest rates to offer a series of apparently cheap loans to small businesses and farmers, with the catch being that the loans were of course denominated in Swiss francs.
Within a few years, those borrowers (whose income was naturally denominated in Australian dollars) got a very painful lesson in that risk, when the exchange rate between the Australian dollar and the Swiss franc moved significantly, putting them very much underwater on those loans.
(This became known as the "Swiss loans affair", with allegations that the banks in question had in many cases not adequately informed the borrowers of the risk).
As a retail investor, you can do Forex trading or you could do time deposits at a Japanese bank (assuming you live here). SMBC Prestia is offering 6.5% on it right now for example:
Pretty sure weight mostly affects how badly you're knocked by other players when they hit you. So heavier is better (although it's often correlated with slow acceleration or poor handling). You want an EV... heavy as hell but with amazing acceleration.
Edit: come to think of it... can you imagine the leader of a political party choosing to step down due to popularity issues, allow a subordinate take the party in a new direction, and suddenly people are much happier with that party? seems oddly familiar. Imagine if the gov was structured in such a way that this is considered normal and then you basically understand why one party is always in power.